For about three years I had a note on my phone titled “app ideas.” Most of it was nonsense, the kind of thing I’d type at midnight and not understand by morning. But one idea kept coming back, and it was almost embarrassing in how simple it was. I wanted one clean place to keep the recipes I actually cook, and a small website I could send to friends when they asked me for “that pasta thing” for the hundredth time.
That was the whole dream. A little app and a little site. And for three years I did absolutely nothing about it, because every time I looked into how, the answer was some version of “learn to code,” or “hire someone,” or “spend a weekend fighting with a tool that assumes you already know what a database is.”
I am not a technical person. I want to be honest about that up front, because I think a lot of these stories quietly skip past it. I do not know what a framework is. I have never used a terminal on purpose. When something on my computer breaks, my strategy is to restart it and hope. So this is not a “look how easy it is when you already sort of know your way around” story. This is the other one.
The part where I almost didn’t
I had poked at the no-code tools before. A couple of years ago I spent a long, joyless Sunday inside one of the drag-and-drop builders, the kind where you snap boxes together to make a screen. On paper it should have worked. In practice it felt like homework for a class I never signed up for. There were workflows and data types and little red error icons, and by the afternoon I had built roughly one screen that did nothing, and I closed the laptop and made an actual dinner instead.
So when a friend mentioned CatDoes, my first reaction was a very tired “sure.” I assumed it would be the same thing wearing a different outfit. I only tried it because it was late, I was procrastinating on something else, and typing a sentence felt like less effort than not typing one.
The thing that got me to keep going was that it did not ask me to learn anything first. There was no tutorial to sit through, no concepts to absorb before I was allowed to begin. It just asked me what I wanted to make. So I told it, in plain English, the way I’d describe it to a friend. Something like: an app where I can save recipes with a photo, tag them by how long they take, and mark the ones I’ve actually made.
Then it started building it.
What it was actually like
I want to describe this part carefully, because it’s the bit that genuinely surprised me.
It didn’t hand me a blank canvas and a hundred settings. It went and made a first version, and then I looked at it and told it what was wrong. “The photo should be bigger.” “Can the tags be at the top instead.” “I don’t like this color, make it warmer.” I was talking to it the same way I’d talk to a friend who happened to be very fast at this and never got annoyed with me. And it just did the things.
That changed the whole feeling of it. With the older tool I’d tried, I was the one who had to know how to build the thing. Here I was the one deciding what the thing should be, and the building happened on the other side. Those are very different jobs, and it turns out I am only qualified for one of them.
There were moments where it felt a little magical and I don’t fully trust that word, so let me be specific about one. I asked it to let me search my recipes by ingredient, which in my head was a “maybe next year” feature, the kind of thing I assumed real developers cried over. It added it. I typed “lemon” and my three lemon recipes showed up. I actually said “oh” out loud to an empty room.
The website happened almost by accident
I only set out to make the app. But once the recipes existed, sending people a screenshot felt silly, so I asked whether I could also have a simple website that showed the same recipes. I half expected to be told that was a separate project, or a different tool, or a different price of admission.
It just built the site too. Same recipes, laid out for a browser, with a real link I could send. A little while later I connected my own domain name to it, which is a sentence I could not have written a year ago and would not have understood if you’d read it to me.
That was the moment the whole thing tipped from “neat toy” into “wait, this is real.” I sent the link to my mum. She texted back a photo of the pasta. The loop closed.
What I want to be honest about
This is the part I’d want if I were reading this instead of writing it, so here it is without the shine.
It was not instant, and it was not effortless. It was fast in a way that genuinely startled me, but I still had to know what I wanted, and I still had to look at each version and decide what was off. If you don’t have a clear picture in your head of the thing you’re making, no amount of clever software will invent taste for you. It’s very good at building. It cannot want something on your behalf.
There were a couple of moments where a change I asked for did something to another part I liked, and I had to go back and say “no, keep the old version of that.” So it wasn’t a perfectly straight line. It was more like editing than typing. You write a messy first draft by describing it, then you shape it by reacting to what comes back.
And I’d gently push back on anyone who says tools like this mean nobody needs to think anymore. If anything I thought more, just about the right things. I spent my attention on what the app should feel like to use, instead of on why a button wouldn’t turn blue.
What actually changed
The app is not going to be in any headlines. It’s a recipe app that maybe forty people will ever open, and most of them are related to me. By any serious measure it is small.
But I made it. The thing that lived in a note for three years exists now, and I use it every week, and there’s a website with my name on the domain. For someone who had quietly filed “building your own app” under “things other people get to do,” that shift is hard to overstate.
I think that’s the part worth sitting with. It isn’t really about recipes, or about any one tool. It’s that the distance between “I wish this existed” and “this exists” got dramatically shorter for people like me, the ones who were never going to learn to code and had made a kind of peace with that. The peace turned out to be unnecessary.
So if you have your own version of that note on your phone, the one full of ideas you assume aren’t for you to build, I’d just say try describing one of them out loud to something that can build it. Worst case you lose an evening, which I was going to lose to scrolling anyway. Best case you say “oh” out loud to an empty room, and then you text your mum a link.
If you end up making something, I genuinely want to see it. Reply and show me.
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